In the hospital setting, medical treatments are increasingly being defined in the form of standardized procedures (or work flows) in a way that is similar to industrial processes. As used here, the term “treatment” includes the entire field of medical treatments, especially diagnosis, therapy planning, and therapy. The efficiency of such standardization is increasingly significant, especially given the increasing cost pressure and hence the economy increasingly demanded of a hospital. Once standardized procedures have been predefined, they can be better planned for, and appointments for them can be set better. Unlike conventional industrial processes, however, such an appointment schedule is a rule difficult to achieve in a hospital setting. This can ascribed particularly to the fact that estimating the actual duration of a medical treatment in advance can be done only with comparatively great uncertainty, because of the individual differences of every patient examined and the associated clinical picture. In particular, findings that affect the duration of the treatment are typically not known until during the course of a treatment.
The resultant deviations from the original appointment schedule, depending on the direction of the deviation, lead to long waiting times for later patients or times when the examination equipment stands idle between two treatments, making for a comparatively low degree of utilization. Low utilization is a considerable disadvantage, above all in the case of a cost-intensive examination or treatment device, such as a particle accelerator used for therapeutic purposes.
Until now, for scheduling appointments in the hospital setting, a conventional, and in particular software-implemented, appointment scheduler with static time allocation has typically been employed. Such an appointment scheduler makes it possible to assign appointments within fixed or variable time slots. If deviations from the appointment schedule occur in practice, then the appointment schedule may need to be updated manually, which is complicated. If for reasons of time the manual updating is not done, then a delay, once it occurs, spreads on and on to newly assigned appointments.